My Post and the Vagenda Posts

You may all remember that on Monday and Tuesday I was teaching an Introduction to Papermaking Course.

On Wednesday I filled out all the forms and emailed them to the National Skills Academy, and on Friday morning, just after I had posted my Blog  the postman knocked and Hey Presto! the Course Certificates have arrived. They should be with the attendees by Tuesday.

Another course is booked for February, so lets hope everything runs as smoothly.

As you may remember I said that there is usually one question that catches me out. The group did not disappoint me. 

In Papermaking we have a process known as the Calendering Process. Essentially the paper gets squashed between two or more rolls to make it nice and smooth. The question I got was, "where did the name come from". A question no-one had asked before, and I have to admit, I had not thought about it either.

During the lunch beak I Googled it on my iPhone and Wikipedia gave me the answer. I will not bore you with the full story, but it comes ultimately from a Greek word that means cylinder.

I mentioned, that as I was driving to the course venue I was listening to the radio about The Quarter Age Crisis. There was a great story on there about two girls, they had finished Uni, could not get a job, and started to write a Blog. The Blog was essentially criticising the articles in women's magazines which were telling women how they could make themselves more appealing to men!

In less than a year they had 7.5 million hits and a dozen publishers fighting to turn their efforts into a book.

Have a look at The Vagenda